Archive for the ‘Reviews etc’ Category

A few years ago I would have jumped at the chance to move from Photoshop to an alternative that looks at least equally powerful but at a fraction of the cost. Now, I’m not so sure, as Photoshop has become much more reasonably priced, and there would be quite a long process of learning to move away to Affinity Photo.

That link is for the Mac version, but as I learnt from Peta Pixel, you can now download a free beta of a Windows version which is said to have an identical interface. I don’t think I will, as I haven’t the time to spend evaluating software and changing my old habits, but it does look good and rather than paying a subscription there is a one-off price. The Windows version when launched will cost the same $50 or £40 as the Mac.

It does seem to offer an alternative to everything I need from Photoshop – I took a quick look through the long listing of features – and elsewhere is a list of cameras it supports for RAW, which included all that I own and of course many more. As a British company the price in the UK is perhaps less likely to be affected by any further drop in the pound as we slide into Breixt economic gloom.

But for me, Photoshop comes more or less as a free gift with Lightroom on my subscription, and I’ve come to love and rely on the way that Lightworks with and catalogues my images. And I still have nagging doubts about Serif, the company that produces Affinity, and whose PagePlus DTP software I used in the long past; Version 1.0 was cheap and worked farily well, but didn’t quite match up to that available at several times the cost from the big names. But it does look as if they have made that jump now, and PagePlus X9 looks rather good and if I wanted new web design software I’d certainly look at WebPlus X8. And Affinity seems to offer all that I use from Photoshop – including the ability to use 64-bit Photoshop plugins.

As I said, I don’t have the time to play with betas. But perhaps in a year or so when others have ironed out the worst bugs I’ll consider Affinity again, and decide if I can live without Lightroom. After all its one-off cost is less than 5 months subs to the Adobe Photography Plan – and after that I’d be saving just over £100 a year. Of course sometime they would bring out a version 2, and perhaps I might feel a need to upgrade, but it would still work out much cheaper.

As well as Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer is also available as a free beta for Windows.

Incidentally another page at Peta Pixel details how you can save 25 % on your Adobe subscription – but it doesn’t seem to work for me, with the Amazon page this links to listing it at the full dollar price of $119.88 – perhaps the offer is/was only available in the US.

Rather more of his photographs appear to have survived, and there is a quite extensive archive on the web site, including the colour images of Brooklyn. There are over 300 of his Brooklyn slides on the site, although quite a few scenes are represented by two or more very similar views.

I was emailed about this site by Nikolai’s brother Ben Klein, who also commented on my 2010 post and has compiled and edited a book on the photographer’s major project, The Settlers. ‘ He tells me that the slides were discovered in Klein’s widow’s house less than ten years ago.

Irwin Klein and the New Settlers, Photographs of Counterculture in New Mexico, ISBN 978-0-8032-8510-1 is edited by Benjamin Klein with essays by David Farber, Tom Fels, Tim Hodgdon, Benjamin Klein, and Lois Rudnick, a foreword by Daniel Kosharek and an introduction by Michael William Doyle is published by the University of Nebraska Press.

You can download a PDF from the university site which includes the contents pages, preface, introduction and opening essay From Innocence to Experience: Irwin B. Klein and the New Settlers of Northern New Mexico, by Benjamin Klein and Tim Hodgdon.

Today’s L’Œil de la Photographie with its article Eikoh Hosoe, Barakei A portrait of Yukio Mishima brought back memories to be of a few days spent in company with him and other photographers back in 2005 in Bielsko-Biala, at their first FotoArtFestival.

Eikoh Hosoe in Bielsko-Biala

It was a great privilege for me to be invited to show some of my urban landscape work from London’s Industrial Heritage along with such distinguished company as Eikoh Hosoe, Ami Vitale, Boris Mikhajlov and Malick Sidibe, as well as many rising stars and a few of those no longer with us, Mario Giacomelli, Inge Morath and Robert Diament, as one of 25 photographers representing 25 countries around the world.

Eikoe Hosoe uses his pink phone camera

I’d travelled light to Poland, and had only taken a small digital pocket camera, a Canon Ixus. It was an excellent camera for the time, but in some of the dimly lit interiors I did find myself wishing I had brought a Nikon. But it was a small and pocketable camera, and I think did remarkably well all things considered. You can see more pictures I took with it on the trip in my FotoArtFestival Diary, along with some of one of my three talks there. As well as presenting my own work, I also gave presentations on the work of two great British photographers, Tony Ray Jones and Raymond Moore, and on the work of some of my London Friends, Paul Baldesare, Jim Barron, Derek Ridgers, Mike Seaborne and Dave Trainer.

Eikoh Hosoe photographs me photographing him

What was remarkable apart from the photography was the atmosphere and camaraderie among the group of photographers there, some of the exhibitors and a few of their friends. Any ice between us had been broken at the press conference, which was enlivened by vitriolic attack on me as a British colonialist by one vodka-fuelled photographer as I got up to speak, enabling me to reply with a robust statement of some of my own political views and working class background, a family history of being screwed by that very same ‘elite’, ending up with us embracing each other – and going to a bar with most of the other photographers. Though I stuck firmly to my own resolve not to drink vodka, the beer was good.

Eikoh Hosoe

Hosoe was certainly the most distinguished of the photographers present, and probably too the oldest, and had a typically Japanese quiet reserve which was rather at odds with his photographic work. Though as some of these pictures show, by the end of the event he was very much one of us.

Eikoh Hosoe shows a picture on his pink phone

The ‘Eye of Photography’ feature accompanies a show of the work Bara-kei, (1961–1962) more often known in English as ‘Ordeal by Roses’, homoerotic images of melodramatic poses by the writer Yukio Mishima, one of Japan’s leading postwar writers, also a poet, playwright and actor as well as a nationalist who founded his own small right-wing student militia, the Tatenokai, taken in Mishima’s own house in TOkoyo. His work set out to break taboos and upset cultural traditions, with an emphasis on sexuality, death and political change, a delusion that led in 1970 to him with just four of his militia to perform a coup attempt to restore the power and divinity of the emperor, thought to have been a dramatic staging for his own ritual suicide with which it ended.

Eikoh Hosoe talks about one of his pictures

The Show ‘Barakei – Killed by Roses’ is at the Galerie Eric Mouchet in the Rue Jacob in Paris from today until December 23, 2016.

There are some images that everyone with the slightest interest in photography know, and two of them were (almost certainly) taken by Robert Capa. Both have long been surrounded by controversy, and the ten or eleven pictures of the D-Day landings have been the main subject of a major series of posts on ‘Photocritic International‘ by A D Coleman and his collaborators.

We can now be certain that while Capa did land on Omaha Beach, he wasn’t in the first wave and was fortunate in that it was a relatively quiet area by the time he got there. ‘Relatively’ is an important qualification and though to the military who were getting on with the job of clearing the beach it was relatively normal, to you and I – or indeed Capa – it was a very scary place to be. So scary that he only managed to take those ten or eleven images before deciding to jump on the next boat out. And who could blame him – or feel they might have done any better?

Capa struck lucky with one of those images, though had it come out as he intended it would have been long forgotten. Imagine it as well-exposed, sharp and with excellent tonality; even if published, it would have been entirely unmemorable – rather like many of the images taken by military photographers on that and the following days.

Discarding the silly myths created around the picture actually make it more interesting. It’s a more human document and we can concentrate on the image and how it evokes what it does rather than think about unbelievable stories about darkroom abuse of film and mythical darkroom workers.

Jim Hughes, as older readers will remember, was a consulting editor for the US magazine Popular Photography, a monthly which in the 1980s I read because it was so much better in its coverage of photography than any of the UK magazines (and I also read its rival ‘Modern Photography‘ for the same reason.) In 1985 he reviewed Richard Whelan‘s authorized biography of Robert Capa for the January 1986 issue.

I’m fairly sure that I will have read that review, in which he was the apparently the first to publish a clear statement that dismisses as myth “the oft-told story of Life‘s London darkroom having ruined the negatives of all but 11 of Capa’s 72 photographs by leaving the film in the drying cabinet with the heat on high and the door closed“. As Hughes makes clear, it just isn’t believable as film is just not affected by heat in the way the story claims.

So while I thought it was my own experience as a photographer (and one who managed to mess up film processing in every conceivable way over the years) that led me to the inevitable conclusion that the story was entirely fictional, perhaps I should now credit Hughes for alerting me to that fact.

Whelan responded to the review by suggesting that Hughes had only seen reproductions of the images in the book of Capa’s photographs, and that these somehow did not allow such conclusions to be made. Was Whelan claiming that the reproductions were so bad that we could not see the obvious? In any case Hughes responded that his conclusions came not from the book but from examination of the original prints.

It seems odd that although photographers such as myself were convinced by the evidence that the darkroom destruction myth was just another story in that great fund of Capa fiction it should have continued to hold such sway – and that even now it has been so comprehensively debunked it should still be published and supported by some leading figures in photography. Whelan simply lacked the photographic knowledge to realise it had to be wrong, but – at least once pointed out – it was clear to those of us who had toiled long in darkrooms.

But more controversial at the time was the discussion by Hughes of Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier‘, already the subject of the 1975 book, The First Casualty by Phillip Knightley. In the latest article, Hughes, who had mentioned the controversy over this image in his review, looks at some of the issues around this image and the attempts by Whelan and Cornell Capa to cover up the controversy.

The post also links to the more recent work by Spanish scholar Jose Manuel Susperregui, which appears to have established conclusively “that Capa’s ‘Falling Soldier’ was staged by Capa at Cerro del Cuco, outside the town of Espejo, Cordoba — and that no soldiers died there that day.”

Painstaking research enabled him to determine the place where the picture was taken. He also establishes that the image was taken on a square format (6x6cm) camera that Capa never used to photograph combat, and was more often used by his partner Gerda Taro; the image characteristics lead him to conclude that this image was indeed taken by Capa although others have suggested it was by Taro.

He shows that the camera was deliberately set up (on a tripod) tilted at an angle to suggest it was on sloping ground rather than the flat field, and the two pictures of different men falling show they were performing for the camera. The post has a link to an English translation of an length illustrated article by Susperregui published in April this year describing his research and conclusions.

The picture does indeed show a ‘falling soldier’, but he is falling not to a bullet but to Capa’s directions, and rather than dying; his injuries will have amounted at worst to a bruised bottom.

I’ve never been a great fan of the ‘rule of thirds’, and was certainly introduced to ‘unconventional framing’ early in my photographic life by the Nathan Lyons book ‘Notations in Passing’. The ‘rule of thirds’ has some use as a way of weaning beginners from the tendency to put every subject dead in the middle of the frame – something that reduced me to a fit a giggles when I once attended an evening class on photography and the tutor showed his work. It – or rather the ‘golden ratio’ to which it is an approximation – has a long history in art, but I’ve always liked images that – in both physical and emotional respects – were more ‘edgy’.

The only real compositional rule is I think one that comes from Minor White, as the text to one of his ‘Three Canons’, “Let the subject generate its own composition.” Unfortunately the image it accompanies (I think a stove in the centre of a church in Arizona, its slightly bent pipe going up to the ceiling in an otherwise symmetrical composition) doesn’t seem to be available on the web. I first met it in the monumental ‘Mirrors, Message and Manifestations’ (which I couldn’t afford but borrowed from our National Library which appeared to be the only UK Library with a copy – which took several months for my local library to obtain and required my signature in blood to borrow for a few weeks,) but I think it is the same image as on page 31 in the later and annoyingly unpaginated ‘Rites & Passages’.

The second post ‘New Software Promises to Take the Grunt Work Out of Ranking Your Images‘ was on PDNPulse a few months ago but I came across it again this morning. The software it refers to, then called Picturesqe but now Picturio, uses artificial intelligence to ‘help you select your best shots’. It identifies simiilar images and judges things like sharpness and exposure, but then, according to PDNPulse:

As the software learns about your images and style, it will grow more sophisticated and be able to rank images based on factors such as sharpness, color harmony and composition.

There is a free version, but this is rather limited, offering ‘Automatic grouping’, ‘Aesthetic ranking’ and ‘Intelligent zoom’ on jpegs only and for only up to 1,500 photos a month – probably a day’s work for many pros. Paid for versions – on a monthly subscription basis – handle more photos (though not that many more), raw formats and integrate with Lightroom. But for the professional version the monthly cost is around the same as we now pay for both Lightroom and Photoshop.

However there are some useful features, and if it really works the time saved should make it worthwhile paying for many. But I’m just a little sceptical. The images that really grab my interest are those that surprise me in some way rather than fit in with my preconceptions, and I have a suspicion that this software might well label some of them as trash because they are in some way uncoventional. Personally I’ll keep doing a relatively quick review before import using FastPictureViewer Professional to select those images to import and then Lightroom itself to pick those I’ll actually use.

Today I’d doing some serous scanning despite it being a lovely day to go out and perhaps take some pictures. But I’ve a busy few days over the weekend and don’t want to get tired before this. I’m trying hard to finish a whole month of black and white work – July 1986. The pictures here are just a small sample from those I took that month, all in London.

Free Trade Wharf, Limehouse, London. July 1986

But before I started did something I should have done several years ago but always put off – something I’m definitely Grade A* at.

I’m scanning today with the Epson V750 flatbed; it’s much faster than the Minolta Dimage Multiscan Pro, and with care the results are virtually as good. I’ve been having problems with the Minolta – the Firewire interface has become unreliable, working for a few scans then giving up halfway, and it had become very difficult to use. It’s the way most of these scanners eventually fail.

The scanner also has a SCSI interface, but getting the SCSI card I have to work in my current computer might be difficult – though I mean one day to try. But SCSI is really now a thing of the past.

For some time I’ve been photographing negatives instead of scanning them, and I had everything set up using the D800E – and then that decided to internally destruct. Again another thing I mean to try is to get it working sufficiently to use for this, but that’s another job I’m putting off. And although the images were sharp and detailed I also had problems with getting even illumination across the frame.

So I decided to use the Epson V750 flatbed that I have on my desk and have mainly used for making scanned ‘contact sheets’ and as a photocopier, or a quick method of getting web-size images from slides or negatives. It is a capable scanner, and the only real reason for not using it before is that I had other ways of scanning negs that were just marginally superior. I’ve used the V750 both at home and elsewhere to produce scans for books by a couple of other photographers, and they have been very happy with the results.

A new Neg carrier

One of the problems that I think Epson themselves acknowledge is that the 35mm filmstrip negative holder just isn’t quite up to the job. They’ve never I think said so, but when they came out with the V800 it had a new holder. Unlike that provided with the V700 and V750 it was not glassless but incorporated anti-Newton’s rings glass as well as more flexible height adjustment to ensure correct focus.

Columbia Market, London. July 1986

Looking at the pictures in the reviews, some of which commented on the improved design, it looked as if it would fit the D750, and I checked this was so before ordering one – rather expensively – from eBay. As well as the A-N glass, it also has better height adjustment than the D700/750 holder. Overall it does seem possible to get flatter negatives and better overall sharpness – though before things were already fairly good

Having the glass does of course make dust more of a problem. But with care and a powerful blower brush, along with the Pro Co Statbrush 2000* conductive brush I used in the darkroom and a lint-free cloth or two it isn’t too bad – and Photoshop sees off much of it very quickly. I seem to get slightly less dust spots than with the Minolta, and so far none of the problems with Newton’s Rings that sometimes plague my Minolta scans. It was an effect I hardly saw in the first year I used the scanner, then told another photographer I hadn’t seen them, after which they became a real problem.

Cleaning under the scanner glass

For several years I’ve been looking at the V750 and seeing smears and dust on the underside of the platen glass; I could clean the top easily, but these remained. The manual didn’t help, and on several occasions I’ve done a quick search on the web and read dire warnings from various people and decided perhaps it didn’t really matter.

This time I was a little more assiduous in my search, and found a few people who said it was a quick and easy job. A link to Epson’s exploded drawings of the scanner on the ‘Better Scanning’ site which has a page about dismantling various Epson models confirmed it was a matter of lifting the lighting module off from the scanner bed and then revealing and removing 4 screws and the top would lift off. And so it did.

The hardest part was removing the four plastic plugs which hide the screws, which I did by kind of digging at their edges with a craft knife and easing them up. They have a V on their top and are easy to spot, one fairly near each corner of the glass bed. Once the screws are removed the top can be pulled off – mine caught a bit at the front a needed a little persuasion. Fortunately fitting it back on again after cleaning turned out to be as simple.

Using Epson Scan

The Epson scanner software isn’t bad when used in ‘Professonal’ mode, though some features – like the ‘Thumbnails‘ which always seem to crop your images are best avoided. I do a Preview scan, click the Normal tab if thumbnails have appeared, then drag a marquee roughly around the first neg I want to scan, and click to ‘zoom’ in. It’s best then to adjust the marquee to be entirely inside the image area to avoid any black and white areas outside the frame which might affect exposure before clicking on the auto-exposure icon.

Auto-exposure will always give a less than optimal result, but does get in you the ballpark. It’s best to keep the Histogram panel open all the time you are scanning and click on the ‘show output’ button to check if there is any black or white clipping. Adjust the input values to get rid of all or almost all of this, then move the midpoint slider to get the image looking roughly how you want it.

I can’t see any real point in not having the output as the default visible in this panel as it is what you really need to see, although sometimes you might want to be able to view the input. It’s one of several minor annoyances about the software, but otherwise it works well. I could instead use Vuescan, which I’ve used with the other scanners, but somehow never bothered with the Epson. Perhaps I’ll download the latest version and give it a try, certainly when I start to scan some colour negs.

It’s best to scan in 16 bit grey for black and white (48 bit RGB for colour) as then you can make final adjustments to brightness and contrast in Photoshop (or other image editor.) You are going to have to open the images in Photoshop anyway to retouch the dust etc. So concentrate on getting all you can from the neg by avoiding clipping.

Re-adjust the marquee boundaries to the edge of the image, and then you are ready to scan. Of course you will have already set the directory for the image to save in and for it to be saved as 16 bit tiff, as well as a suitable stem for the name – to which Epson Scan with add 001, 002…

Closed Turf Accountants, Micawber St, Islington, London. July 1986

When the scan has saved, click on ‘Full’ in the preview pane, shift the marquee to the next image on the page you want to scan, and then ‘Zoom’ to view it and adjust exposure. Only use the auto-expose icon if it comes up way out, otherwise it is generally quicker to adjust from the previous values. And ‘unsharp mask’ has a habit of sneaking itself on. You don’t need it – if you want sharpening, Photoshop can do it better.

One further hint. Always go through the negs and decide exactly which are worth scanning – I mark the contact sheets, but if you don’t have these, you can write down the negative numbers. Otherwise if you are like me you will end up scanning twice as many.

* Not quite as effective as those Polonium 210 based StaticMaster brushes we used to use, but which now appear unobtainable in the UK. Quite safe so long as you remembered not to stir your tea with them!

I was relieved when I checked in our slang dictionary to find that there was as yet no definition for the term ‘osborne‘ or ‘osborned‘; otherwise it might have been confusing for me to propose a new usage.

An osborne is clearly a kind of fraud or confidence trick, based on the use of dodgy statistics, false assumptions and long-winded speeches, and aimed at benefiting the wealthy at the expense of the poor. And on Nov 25th last year we were clearly ‘osborned‘. The letters at the protest on the previous night spelt out clearly (at times) that it was a N I G H T M A R E.

It was also something of a nightmare to photograph, as the area where the figures were standing was probably the darkest point in Trafalgar Square, with most of what light there was falling on the back of the figures – as you can see from the shadows they are casting on the paving in front of them. I’d taken the 20mm f2.8 and it was only wide enough to encompass the group when used from one side – had I moved back you would have seen a pack of around 20 people with cameras and phones all trying to photograph the same group. The few pros possibly had lenses wide enough to encompass the whole group, but on most of the phone images it probably said GHTMA.

I didn’t need to use flash, as there were several people with lights on video cameras – who could pan across the group to reveal the whole word, though I did see one who appeared to be reading it as ERAMTHGIN. Annoyingly sometimes their lights went off or turned away just when I wanted to make an exposure. With their lights I was able to work with the D700 set at 1/60s, f/4 and ISO 3,200; as usual to get things looking like night I needed to dial in an exposure adjustment – this time -0.7Ev.

Then someone had the idea it would better fit a still image if the word was split into two and the two put one above the other. I think it made a better picture, but now there was someone shining their video light at me from the edge of the frame. As normal I preferred an oblique view, and for this image I did use flash, working with the 28-200mm on the D810 at 42mm in DX mode – equivalent to 63mm.

Later the protesters marched down to Downing St for a rally opposite and there isn’t a great deal of light, so most pictures needed flash, particularly for the speakers, where you need a relatively fast shutter speed to capture gestures and avoid subject movement. It didn’t really need the 1/640s that I appear to have used for this image – I was working in S mode and my random wandering finger appears to have shifted the main control dial backwards and forwards rather a lot.

It was perhaps a little fortunate – because as a slower speed – such as the 1/125 I probably intended, that pointing hand might have shown more blur, and the windows behind in the Ministry of Defence would have bee more of a distraction.

Back in the old days of course, flash sync at 1/640th with a focal plane shutter was simply impossible; most cameras were limited to 1/50 or 1/60s, and setting a higher speed resulted in only a part of the frame being exposed. Now with the Nikon D810 if you have custom setting e1 set to Auto FP High-Speed Sync you can use flash at any shutter speed.

I took some more pictures of people in the blackness of the crowd without flash, including some I felt were perhaps just a little to noisy – like the one above. Taken with the camera set at ISO3200, it had a ‘grainy’ effect, which wasn’t unpleasant, but was very noticeable in larger versions of the image than web size. Writing this, I thought this was a good example to try out using the noise reduction of the now free Dfine in the Google Nik Collection

I applied the filter in automatic mode on the full size file, and the difference was pretty remarkable, with the noise virtually entirely removed, and Photoshop’s ‘Despeckle‘ filter cleared it a little more. I can only just see the difference even in the two reduced size jpegs in this post, but on larger images the difference is very apparent.

There very little apparent loss of image detail in the treatment, and removing the noise makes what detail there is clearer. After I made the small jpeg to use in this post, I did clean up the larger file using Photoshop’s ‘Dust and Scratches‘ filter, with a radius of 2px and a threshold of 5px. The resulting image is remarkable for an image in such poor light.

It’s a shame that the Polaroid ‘Dust and Scratches’ filter which often worked rather better than the Photoshop equivalent is no longer available and doesn’t seem to work in Photoshop CC. It will still run as stand-alone software under Windows 7 and can be used to produce even smoother images when applied to the results from Dfine2. But it does so at the expense of a little detail

A double pass can remove both white and black specks, but you need to convert images to sRGB before using it, and it does lose some detail, so need to be used with caution. And of course such processing is time-consuming and largely unnecessary. The Polaroid filter is best kept for use with scanned images where the dust is usually rather larger.

The following day as George Osborne got to his feet in Parliament to deliver his speech I was outside his family interior decoration business on the King’s Road in Chelsea with Class War – as you can see and read at Class War at Osborne & Little.

They compared the same scene photographed on leading Canon, Sony and Nikon cameras and asked people to rate the 3 images and say which camera they came from. And the results showed that there was very little difference between whether they photographed the studio scene on a Canon 5DsR, Sony A7RII, or Nikon D810.

Not only was there no real difference in detail, resolution etc, there was an almost identical colour to the three images. I still think there are differences in colour between the images produced by the three cameras, but these are down to differences in how the auto white balance works rather than anything inherent to the camera. And the differences are easily corrected in post-processing.

But the main differences between the three marques are in handling. How convenient is the control layout, and the menus. Which way do zooms zoom? and where do you have to line up the dots when changing lenses, and which way do you turn them. I’ve used Nikon for over 12 years now, and I still find it much easier and faster to change lenses on a camera that works the same way as Leica does. But the buttons etc on Nikon seem so much better than the interface on Canon. And so on. My ideal SLR camera would still be the Olympus OM4, but no one has ever made a digital version of that – and of course I’d like some updates such as auto-focus and high speed flash sync.

Perhaps I should be pleased that one of the cameras I use came out marginally top on the test, but quite frankly I could not tell the difference and suspect it was probably not statistically significant. But at least it does reinforce my own feeling that the extra pixels in the 50Mp Canon EOS 5DS R are of no significance.

I’m actually thinking of going back to DX format for my next camera – I’ve always thought there was – as Nikon for some years maintained – no real advantage in the larger FX format. It wasn’t that the results were any better, just the larger sensor meant the cameras had a better and brighter viewfinder.

My ailing D700 is still taking good photographs – at least when I manage to point it in the right direction at the right time with the right lens. But its days are surely numbered (and a service that would address its current faults would cost more than its worth.) I’ll probably replace it by another Nikon, but can’t at the moment decide whether to buy a D750 or, when they get into the shops, a D500. Or perhaps by the time I’ve made my mind up there will be something new available to change it!

Partition of India back in 1947 was a bloody business, and one that continues to have many bloody repercussions, not least in the Bangladesh Liberation War in 1971, which was the subject of an earlier show curated by Shahidul Alam (with Mark Sealey) ‘Bangladesh 1971‘ at Autograph ABP in Shoreditch, London, in 2008.

Although the great majority of the population of Bangladesh are Bengali, some areas of the country have considerable numbers of indigenous peoples, notably in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in the south-east, bordering Myanmar and India, where they form roughly half of the population. Collectively known as the Jumma, the largest ethnic group is the Chakma (also known as Pehari) people. Unlike the Bengali majority who are largely Muslim, the indigenous people are mainly Buddhists.

Lord Mountbatten, sent as Viceroy to India to oversee independence and partition, was so concerned over the Boundary commission’s decision to include the CHT in East Pakistan that he delayed announcing the commission’s decisions until the day after Independence Day as he feared it would provoke a powerful reaction, with boycotts of the celebrations.

After independence the Bangladeshi government have attempted to solve the problem by settling the area with Bengali people, and the hill tribes set up a resistance movement with a guerilla force (encouraged covertly by India) which launched an insurgency in 1977 and the area became highly militarised, with government forces and paramilitary groups carrying out atrocities including mass rapes, genocide and ethnic cleansing.

Although a peace treaty was signed in 1997, Wikipedia reports “According to Amnesty International as of June 2013 the Bangladeshi government had still not honored the terms of the peace accord nor addressed the Jumma peoples concerns over the return of their land. Amnesty estimate that there are currently 90,000 internally displaced Jumma families.”

Kalpana Chakma “was a vocal and charismatic leader who campaigned for the rights of the indigenous people” of which she was one, and had become leader of the Hill Women’s Federation, speaking out against the military occupation and handing out their land to Bengali settlers. She was only 23 on 12 June 1996 when, a few hours before voting began in a national election in which she had been campaigning for an independent candidate, Lieutenant Ferdous and other members of the Bangladesh Army raided her family home and abducted her and her two brothers.

Attempts to report her abduction and get information from the army and police were refused, and continuing attempts to get at the truth about what happened to Kalpana Chakma have been met with deliberate lies and obfuscation.

Shahidul’s work in ‘Kalpana’s Warriors‘, curated by him together with Rahnuma Ahmed, Saydia Gulrukh, Dadia Marium and ASM Rezaur Rahman is an attempt to ‘break the silence surrounding her disappearance‘ but is also a powerful celebration of her continuing influence on political activists, the ‘warriors’ who have fought to demand the truth about her abduction and to obtain justice, as well as a candlelit vigil in her memory.

It’s probably best to visit part two of the exhibition first, which contextualises the work with images which show something of the area and the movement of which Kalpana was a part. A film made by Alam shows a number of people talking about Kalpana and her influence, with English subtitles, and at 35 minutes it seems a little slow-moving.But this is a general problem with subtitled interviews in that you can read in a second what perhaps takes 15 seconds to say, and then have to wait impatiently for the next sentence.

The installation in the ground floor main gallery is impressive, with large images, heads and shoulders at much greater than life-size etched on straw mats, each illuminated by a single hanging candle. It was getting dark outside when I walked around it, and it might be just lose a little during daylight hours with more light leaking in from outside.

The straw mats are like those found in the village homes in CHT, and on one of which which Kalpana would have been sleeping when the soldiers came to take her, and the technique used to print on them also reflects the realities of life for her and her people. Before her abduction she had been leading protests against the burning of Pahari villages, and the images are burnt onto the mats using a laser beam. There are smaller 4×3″ more conventional prints in small piles against the wall around the installation which you can pick up and take away, with short texts on the reverse naming and describing the ‘warriors’.

The installation with its hanging mats in a circle which you can walk around both outside and inside is an experience with a highly religious feel to it, like entering a temple. Even on the opening night when it was relatively crowded – with numbers strictly limited to 30 inside the installation for health and safety reasons and many were using their phones to take photographs – it had a powerful atmosphere, and I think this would be more so on a normal day when it was quiet and empty.

It’s a show I recommend highly, and Kalpana’s Warriors continues at Autograph until 18 June.

Media and copyright lawyer Rupert Grey wrote a very detailed review of Shahidul Alam’s fine book ‘My Journey as a Witness‘ which includes a great deal about him as well as some pictures. You can also see videos on Vimeo and others on YouTube. You can see more work at Alam’s web site and he posts regularly on the ShahidulNews blog.

We can get some idea of the quality of the extreme ISO pictures on the new Nikon D5 from some sample image by Leon Ostrom of Randorn in a post on PetaPixel.

Not able to take away any images on a memory card, he photographed a series of test shots on the Nikon stand at CES 2016, then photographed the results displayed on the LCD screen on the back of the camera, both showing the full frame and a magnified detail, at Hi-1 (ISO 204,800) to Hi-5 (ISO 3,280,000).

Although these are only pictures of the image on the LCD screen.they give a very good impression of the possibilities of the camera, although the actual images could be greatly improved by appropriate noise reduction in post. Most impressive is the quality at Hi-1, which of course drops off as amplification increases. Hi-2 (IS0 409,600) looks to be usable for many purposes after noise reduction, while higher ISOs are distinctly emergency only.

Its a remarkable achievement, and one that makes me lust after the D5, though it isn’t a feeling I can sustain for long given the price and weight of the camera. But certainly it does make me hope for better high ISO and more affordable and lighter new models from Nikon. Even going back to DX with the D500 might be an option.

It also is a stark reminder of the ridiculous nature of the arithmetic ASA system. which was incorporated into ISO along with the much more sensible logarithmic DIN scale, where a one stop difference is an increase in 3, which makes it much easier especially when the ASA numbers get astronomical.

Back in the days of Tri-X, it was a 400/27 film (though we actually often rated it differently depending on which developer we were using and how we liked our negatives.) But its a good starting point for thinking about film speeds, and my starting point for this little table (more about film speeds for geeks on Wikipedia):

Either using this little table (or being able to divide by three) you can see that Hi-2 gives us a 10 stop advantage over Tri-X (or 8 stops over Tri-X pushed a couple of stops) which is certainly not to be sneezed at.

With the D700 and D810 I’m now working with, the practical limit I find is around ISO 6400 – so the D5 is performing at around 5 or 6 stops down the scale better. The D4 and Sony A7SII both claimed 409600 in 2014, so the D5 claims 3 stops more than them. It does seem pretty remarkable.